Impact Evaluation of Farmer Field Schools 1991-1999

(The text below was extracted from Feder, Gershon, Rinku Murgai, and Jaime Quizon, "Sending Farmers Back to School - The Impact of Farmer Field Schools in Indonesia", World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Number 3022, May 2003)

The data come from a panel survey of Javanese households conducted by the Indonesian Center for Agro-Socioeconomic Research (CASER) in April/May 1991 and again in June 1999.

The baseline sample included randomly selected rice-growing villages that had already been covered by the program, as well as villages that were not yet covered by the program but were in areas where the program was planned to be implemented. All villages were visited in the repeat survey, but our analysis focuses only on those villages that had not yet been exposed to an FFS at the time of the baseline survey in 1991. Five of these villages had not yet been served with an FFS program even by the time of the 1999 survey, and the 52 households from these villages are thus a control group. Of the 268 households from villages where a field school had been implemented between 1991 and 1999, only 112 had actually participated in the training (whether administered by officials or by farmer-trainers) while the remaining 156 households had not attended a program, but had been potentially exposed to some of its effects through informal communications with graduates of the program.(*) Therefore, our data allow us to separately identify the effects of FFS on graduates and exposed farmers.

Another source of variation in program participation comes from the fact that field schools were first introduced in the sample villages at different times between the two surveys. Of the 21 program villages in the sample, 13 were first exposed to field schools within three years after the baseline survey (i.e., by April/May 1993). 5 villages were exposed the following year, and the remaining 3 were exposed after 1995/96. Therefore, our data also allow us to explicitly account for the length of pre- and post-program exposure for graduates and exposed farmers.

The 1991 survey collected information on households' farm operations and characteristics for the 1990/91 wet season and on their household attributes, activities and assets.

The 1999 resurvey covered the wet season 1998/99 and included most of the questions of the baseline effort. To the extent possible, interviewers avoided changing the language and format the original 1991 questions in order to preclude any bias that may arise when later comparing responses from both panels. The 1999 survey, however, collected additional data, such as when the household participated in FFS training, more information about the community, and some retrospective details, such as information on when the community was first exposed to FFS, details pertaining to the training attended by FFS participants and follow-up activities.

(*) In the empirical analysis, we do not differentiate between graduates trained by officials versus farmer-trainers because previous studies have shown that the quality of training provided by the two sources was similar (van de Fliert, Pontius, and Roling).